Crele Penedesencas are autosexers - that means that you can tell at hatch which are girls and which are boys. The girls are a warm chocolate brown with a white dot on their heads and the boys are lighter towards a brown gray and have markings on their backs as well as the dot on their heads. If you are able to pick your chicks at the local feedstore, someone may have already grabbed all the girls and only left the boys, so be careful about that. I tend to hatch more girls than boys in the spring but more boys in the heat of the summer.
Black roos are very slow at getting their tails but quick to get their comb.
I love Penedesencas - they are a robust bird, not at all prone to Mareks, great foragers. Creles are my favorite - I think they are beautiful - but they lay the lightest eggs of all the Penedesencas here at my place. The darkest eggs I get come from my black Penedesenca, then some of my White Empordanesa, then my Partridge Penedesenca, then my Wheaton Penedesenca, then my Crele Penedesencas. The young hens seem to lay their darkest eggs right when they first start laying.
Penedesenca seem to be the best for free ranging of any birds I have kept. They escape predators and that instinct to fly away quickly saves their skin many times. The boys are never aggressive, live together well if raised together, and are not hard on their hens.
If you do end up with too many roos they can make wonderful olive egg layers with a blue egg hen. They can also help to darken cuckoo marans kept just for eggs.
There is a Penedesenca club forming and we have a yahoo group called Penedesenca_USA.
